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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Tradition, Principle And Self-Sovereignty: Competing Conceptions Of Liberty In The United States Constitution, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The “liberty” protected by the United States Constitution has been variously interpreted as the “liberty” of thinking persons to speak, worship and associate with others, unimpeded by onerous state law; the liberty of consumers and producers to make individual market choices, including the choice to sell one’s labour at any price one sees fit, free of redistributive or paternalistic legislation that might restrict it; and the liberty of all of us in the domestic sphere to make choices regarding reproductive and family life, free of state law that might restrict it on grounds relating to public morals. Although the United …
Are There Nothing But Texts In This Class? Interpreting The Interpretive Turns In Legal Thought, Robin West
Are There Nothing But Texts In This Class? Interpreting The Interpretive Turns In Legal Thought, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Allan Hutchinson remarks at the beginning of his interesting article that Gadamer's writings have had only a peripheral influence on legal scholarship -- only occasionally cited, and then begrudgingly so, and never given the serious attention they deserve or require. Nevertheless, Hutchinson acknowledges, Gadamerian influences can be noted -- particularly in the now widely shared understanding that adjudication is, fundamentally, an interpretive exercise. Even with this qualification, though, I think Hutchinson understates Gadamer's impact. Whatever may be true of Gadamer's influence in other disciplines, his influence in law has been unambiguously both broad and deep -- although it has come …
Is Progressive Constitutionalism Possible?, Robin West
Is Progressive Constitutionalism Possible?, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Progressivism is in part a particular moral and political response to the sadness of lesser lives, lives unnecessarily diminished by economic, psychic and physical insecurity in the midst of a society or world that offers plenty. This insecurity is unjust and should end; the suffering should be alleviated, and those lives should be enriched. To do so must be one of the goals of a morally just or justifiable state. Not all suffering and not all lesser lives, of course, give rise to such a response. The suffering attendant to accident, disease, war and happenstance is neither entirely chargeable to …
Integrity And Universality: A Comment On Dworkin's Freedom's Law, Robin West
Integrity And Universality: A Comment On Dworkin's Freedom's Law, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Ronald Dworkin has done more than any other constitutional lawyer, past or present, to impress upon us the importance of integrity to constitutional law, and hence to our shared public life. Far from being merely a private virtue, Dworkin has shown that integrity imposes constraints upon and provides guidance to the work of judges in constitutional cases: Every constitutional case that comes before a court must be decided by recourse to the same moral principles that have dictated results in relevant similar cases in the past. Any group or individual challenging the constitutionality of legislation which adversely affects his or …
Toward An Abolitionist Interpretation Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robin West
Toward An Abolitionist Interpretation Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
It is by now an open secret that current interpretations of the meaning of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and of its relevance and mandate for contemporary problems of racial, gender, and economic justice, are deeply and, in a sense, hopelessly conflicted. The conflict, simply stated, is this: to the current Supreme Court, and to a sizeable and influential number of constitutional theorists, the "equal protection of the laws" guaranteed by the Constitution is essentially a guarantee that the categories delineated by legal rules will be "rational" and will be rationally related to legitimate state ends. To …
Equality Theory, Marital Rape, And The Promise Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robin West
Equality Theory, Marital Rape, And The Promise Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
During the 1980s a handful of state judges either held or opined in dicta what must be incontrovertible to the feminist community, as well as to most progressive legal advocates and academics: the so-called marital rape exemption, whether statutory or common law in origin, constitutes a denial of a married woman's constitutional right to equal protection under the law. Indeed, a more obvious denial of equal protection is difficult to imagine: the marital rape exemption denies married women protection against violent crime solely on the basis of gender and marital status. What possibly could be less rational than a statute …
The Meaning Of Equality And The Interpretive Turn, Robin West
The Meaning Of Equality And The Interpretive Turn, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The turn to hermeneutics and interpretation in contemporary legal theory has contributed at least two central ideas to modern jurisprudential thought: first, that the "meaning" of a text is invariably indeterminate -- what might be called the indeterminacy claim -- and second, that the unavoidably malleable essence of texts -- their essential inessentiality -- entails that interpreting a text is a necessary part of the process of creating the text's meaning. These insights have generated both considerable angst, and considerable excitement among traditional constitutional scholars, primarily because at least on first blush these two claims seem to inescapably imply a …